Medical clamps for constricting and thereby regulating flow through tubing are generally small and light-weight, so that the clamps can be supported by the tubing itself. In the medical field, such clamps are commonly used as part of a flow control tubing system of regulating medical fluids passing through the system. Systems of this type, as well as other medical laboratory systems, frequently use compressible plastic tubing with flow control clamps to control flow through the tubing.
Such tubing clamps are set to constrict the tubing for a prescribed flow through the tubing, for example, drops per minute or ml/hr. A common medical application would be the infusion of medical fluid into a patient's venous system.
When in use, the clamps are frequently removed, relocated and reinstalled on the tubing system when the patient is moved or the system is taken down and set up again for purposes of changing medications, dosages or cleaning.
One of the major problems associated with previous clamps employed for similar purposes is the requirement of threading the plastic tubing through the clamp or assembly, like threading a needle, which in most cases is typically done by the manufacturer and not the end user.
The prior art clamps which can be opened for sidewise installation of tubing usually have more than one component. This sometimes resulted in the loss or misplacing of one of the separable components prior to assembly with delay in the installation until the missing component is found.
Also, former tubing clamps may lack sufficient variability or precision in regulating flow. For instance, former versions occasionally lack the required degree of precision in flow control between certain settings; and, medical personnel using the former clamps may have encountered difficulty in setting the clamp to the prescribed flow rate.
In addition to the foregoing disadvantages, some prior flow control devices were not provided with any visual means to indicate the adjusted setting of the device at the prescribed flow rate. Thus when such flow control devices of the prior art were disconnected from the tubing system, for example, when taken down for adjusting or putting a new bag or bottle in the system, it would then be necessary to manually reset the device to provide a similar drip rate. Such resetting is time consuming, leads to inaccuracy and represents a negative factor in the prior flow control devices.
Finally, the former flow control devices, which had more than one component and were manufactured from plastic molds, required a separate mold for each component of the device; and the components of the clamp were separate pieces when manufactured. This increases manufacturing costs and ultimately the purchase price for the item. An important advantage of manufacturing the clamp in a single mold as a one-piece structure is that all the required pieces of the clamp are together at the time of use. In a medical setting, this factor is important for it decreases the possibility that one component of the clamp might be lost or unavailable, thereby rendering the device useless.